CRM marketing is about cultivating deep, long-term and valuable relationships with customers. Achieving this requires a long-haul strategy that focusses on customer experience and long-term value.

At the heart of CRM Marketing is data and using that data to generate insight and knowledge to create more relevant engagement that facilitates deeper & more valuable emotional bonds. 

Delivering relevant content and communications to customers must be the goal of every relationship marketing programme. Relevance is about understanding the customer wants, needs and motivations that really matter in relation to your brand. 

CRM Marketing programmes must have longevity, its content and theme must be driven by customer wants, needs and interests and offer the right balance of emotional and rational content and benefits. 

Traditionally, we only think of relationship marketing in terms of customers, but the principles can be applied to many different cohorts including prospects, employees and stakeholders.

Prospect Relationship Marketing (PRM)

The primary objective of PRM is to turn prospects into customers but unlike other forms of acquisition marketing it is not a short-term tactic. A great way to think of PRM is seeing it like an aircraft holding pattern. You are keeping your prospects warm until they are ready to land (become a customer).

Many companies will have people who hand raise to find out more about a product or wish to be kept in touch but these people are not yet ready to buy. These are the people who are at the top of your purchase funnel and you need to move them through the consideration stage into purchase. Depending on factors such as product purchase cycle, product cost or purchase complexity you may have prospects in this holding pattern for a length of time. 

So, you need to embark on relationship building journey with these prospects that will be similar to how you do things with CRM but with these notable differences.

1. The relationship needs to be appropriate for a prospect – keep the level of contact at an appropriate level, don’t over-contact them.

2. Keep focussed on what they’re interested in – don’t overtly try to cross-sell them other products.

3. Learn about your prospects – start to get to know your prospects through data collection and engagement analysis.

Employee Relationship Marketing (ERM)

ERM is about developing and managing the relationship between employees and the employer. Ultimately the objective of ERM is to improve staff retention levels but its scope can be so much wider than that.

The core of ERM is an ongoing staff communication programme that is quite different to standard corporate newsletters and staff memos.  This is an approach to the way a company communicates with its employees. At its heart is the principle of relevance – showing that the company knows and understands its staff. And in these times of remote working being the norm, ERM can provide a crucial tool in communicating the company’s culture.

ERM could involve creating a segmentation of employees which include variables such as lifestage, interests and personality types (depending on what data they hold on their people). These segments could then be used to personalise communication content to increase engagement levels.

Stakeholder Relationship Marketing (SRM)

Building positive stakeholder relationships is crucial for most companies. However, stakeholders are rarely a homogenous mass so the starting point with SRM is grouping them into appropriate segments such as shareholders, government bodies, suppliers etc.

Just like PRM & ERM, at its core SRM has an ongoing communication programme. Stakeholders value consistent messaging and want to know they can rely on you for up-to-date information. Stakeholders also want to know their views have been heard so it essential that SRM establishes a dialogue.

If you are in a one-way conversation, you are talking at someone, rather than with someone. Whereas, if you are in a two-way conversation, you are both listening and talking. This is crucial for building a long-term relationship. So, you need to give your stakeholders opportunities to engage with you, to tell you what they think and what they want. 

Further Reading

We have in recent times become a little confused with the term CRM - but in our world, it can only mean Customer Relationship Marketing - the art of developing strong emotional bonds with your customers that enable you to become closer to them and become a trusted brand.  This is not done for altruistic purposes, by becoming a preferred brand you automatically get more share of pocket from the customer who you have nurtured and developed into a loyal advocate.  In this related article we talk about how you can use your existing data and content to drive revenue from the same budget so you can afford to market to more customers, more often to keep your brand top of mind.